Amos Beman Scrapbooks

The Amos Beman Scrapbook collection includes news clippings related to and collected by Amos Gerry Beman, a black minister in New Haven, Connecticut. Beman was a national leader during the mid-nineteenth century, a proponent of abolition, suffrage, temperance and educational and moral reform.

Beman grew up in Colchester, Connecticut and later Middletown, Connecticut, where his father, Jehiel Beman, was appointed pastor to the first African American church in Connecticut. Beman’s father had worked tirelessly for emancipation and civil rights, and his grandfather, Caesar Beman, had been manumitted after serving in the Revolutionary War.

The scrapbooks document the parish where Amos Beman served as pastor and the work of other ministers; they include church dedications, announcements of temperance meetings, discussions of education for African-Americans, debates regarding African colonization, published speeches of Frederick Douglass, accounts of Amos Beman’s public appearances and speaking engagements, as well as correspondence, letters to the editor authored by Beman and the Proceedings of the Connecticut State Convention of Colored Men, held in New Haven on September 12-13, 1849 and June 6-7, 1865.

Call number: JWJ MSS Beman

Image: Amos Beman Portrait, Scrapbook 3

More images from the Collection: Amos Beman Scrapbooks Image Guide

 

Yale College Poets Reading

Kevin Young at Yale

Tuesday, April 5 at 4:00, Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG), The Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series presents:
Kevin Young, the Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing, and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, Emory University.

A reading in conjunction with the Yale University Art Gallery’s current exhibition, Embodied: Black Identities in American Art from the Yale University Art Gallery. The exhibition, a collaboration among a team of students from Yale and the University of Maryland, College Park, features works that address, question, and complicate the paradigms that have mapped meanings onto African American bodies throughout history. The 54 works selected for the exhibition, representing the Gallery’s commitment during the past decade to growing this area of the collection, include paintings, sculpture, decorative arts, prints, drawings, and photographs.

Sponsored by the Yale University Art Gallery, the Schlesinger Visiting Writer Series, and the Departments of African American Studies and English, and the Beinecke Library.